My melancholy little Circus of Doom.

This was years ago, mind you, when he was still living in Philadelphia.

He’d been drinking for most of the day, by this point; which wasn’t a regular habit at the time, though friends reported he had been a little stressed of late. He wasn’t a violent man, as a rule. But even the gentlest souls have a breaking point. And so it was that one day, mere hours before being due to start broadcast on another episode of American Bandstand, Clark was found several miles outside of town at a pig farm beating a large sow with Charlie O’Donnell’s mailbox.

Why he had been at Charlie’s house earlier that day, doing what he did, is a mystery that never did get resolved. He and Charlie were pretty good friends, after all, so for him to show up at Charlie’s house with a rucksack full of enamel paints & proceed to adorn Charlie’s front fence with obscene imagery and then let the air out of all the tyres of his car before attacking & then making off with his mailbox is really quite inexplicable behaviour, but really that’s another story entirely.

Now, lucky for the sow, Charlie O’Donnell’s mailbox was not really well-designed as far as improvised clubs go, so Dick wasn’t really managing to inflict that much damage. Nevertheless, it took 3 farmhands to take him down that day and another fifth of bourbon on top of what he’d already had to quieten him down once more. He missed his broadcast that day, but after writing letters of apology to all concerned and making financial reparations where appropriate, the matter was allowed to fall and was never spoken of again.